This invention relates to an attachment system or process for mounting flexible, easily replaceable advertising displays on to the side of a vehicle, such as a truck, tractor trailer, or van or fixed billboards or signs of various sizes.
There have been developed a number of methods for displaying advertising signage on the side of moving vehicles. Given the increased mobility of the public, and the growing unsatisfied demand for fixed roadside signage, the mobile billboard, achieved by mounting advertising art to the side of a transport vehicle, is becoming ever more common, and ever more practical, given advances in the technology of printing such advertising art, allowing better color quality, as well as much greater pixel resolutions. Taken together, these factors now make mobile, lateral surface of transport vehicle, advertising a higher quality and more sought after mode of commercial publicity than ever before. With the development of the science of mobile commercial publicity production, one would expect a corresponding development and sophistication in the technology of mounting said media to their substrate, the lateral sides of transport vehicles. This invention is a new step in said development and sophistication.
There are a number of constraining factors in designing a mobile advertising mounting system, some regulatory, others aesthetic, some physical. First, there exist federal as well as state transportation regulations restricting the width of transport vehicles to an upper limit of 102 inches. Secondly, transport advertising is most often procured by leasing the use of a carrier""s fleet for such purpose. The fleet owner is inclined to lease to the advertising broker whose system impacts the lest on the fleet""s vehicles, in terms of time required for initial setup of the system, turnaround time for installation/replacement of a particular image, and complexity of the permanent hardware attached to the vehicle.
Further, in order to maintain the planar aspect of the sign, which is critical to readability from afar, the current industry practice is to apply tension to the signage. The present invention is directed towards providing an improved method for applying said tension.
Tension has been applied in a variety of ways in the past. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,239,765 tensioning is accomplished by wrapping the edges of the signage around a rectangular rod on the top and bottom edges and the wrapping is held in place by rows of anchors. The series of anchors method presents obvious difficulties as far as bringing the individual anchors within the top or bottom row into perfect linear alignment.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,507,109 uses shock cords attached to grommets and to a truck wall by means of S hooks connected to either flanges which run along the bottom and top edges of the sides of most trailers or by holes drilled in the sides of the trailer.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,209,245 entitled xe2x80x9cSign Display Attachment Methodxe2x80x9d which issued on Apr. 3, 2001 to the present inventor describes the use of a plurality of recesses on one side of a mounting plate with a pair of prongs on an insertion bead being receivable in combination within one of the plurality of recesses. Tension is controlled by selection of which of the plurality of recesses to employ.
Applicant""s co-pending application No. 09/305,861 uses slots to tension the signage, the tension being maintained by screws/nuts secured through said signage and the slots and the truck or sign wall.
What is desired is a simpler, tool free method of tensioning signage mounted to a truck or a sign specially engineered to impact the truck or trailer at a minimum in terms of fasteners per foot required to the truck or trailer siding. Such a system should keep the signage material as planar as possible.
Further, such a system would have its framing removable, and insure protrusion from the lateral surface of the vehicle low enough to comply with all regulatory maximum vehicle width specifications.
The present invention meets these needs.